Jonah Lehrer Novel ‘How We Decide’ Pulled From Shelves

Former New Yorker staff writer Jonah Lehrer has had a second novel pulled from bookshelves.

According to publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt senior vice president Bruce Nichols, Lehrer’s 2009 novel How We Decide is being taken “off sale” with “no plans to reissue it in the future.” The decision to remove the book from shelves came after an internal review, but HMH declined to comment further on the matter.

Lehrer’s 2012 novel Imagine was pulled off of shelves last July after Michael Moynihan, who was then working for Tablet magazine and is now a contributor to The Daily Beast, reported that Lehrer fabricated quotes from Bob Dylan. Lehrer was immediately dismissed from The New Yorker and admitted to recycling his own work and reporting for different publications.

Moynihan said Lehrer’s first novel, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, is still available for sale. The publisher said an internal review didn’t find any problems with the book and that it “will remain in print.”

As previously reported by The Inquisitr, Lehrer was paid $20,000 by the Knight Foundation for a speech about plagiarism last month. The foundation later issued an apology, stating that they never should have rewarded a known plagiarist who broke the most basic principle of journalism.

Lehrer apologized and admitted to the plagiarism, saying, “I’m the author of a book on creativity that contained several fabricated Bob Dylan quotes. I committed plagiarism on my blog, taking without credit or citation an entire paragraph from the blog of Christian Jarrett. I plagiarized from myself. I lied to a journalist named Michael Moynihan to cover up the Dylan fabrications.”